Scholar of Russian and Byzantine art; wife of art historian David Talbot
Rice. Abelson was the daughter of Israel Boris Abelevich Abelson, a businessman
and finance officer to the czar, and Louisa Elizabeth ("Lifa") Vilenkin (Abelson)
(d. 1954). Raised in privilege by governesses and (she was a god-daughter to Leo
Tolstoy), she attended the Tagantzeva Girls' School in St Petersburg until the
Revolution in 1917 forced her family to flee, she and her mother to Finland and
eventually to London and Paris. In England, she briefly attended Cheltenham
Ladies' College and St Hugh's College, Oxford, in 1921 before transferring to
the Society of Oxford Home Students (now St Anne's College). Abelson met
many young Oxford scholars through the salon of Herbert E. ''Doggins'' Counsell,
M. D.
(1863-1946),
including David Talbot Rice, her future husband, Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and Harold
Acton (1904-1994) both of whom she would remains friends. This group all formed to some degree the
personalities for Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Her closest women friends were
Christine Trew (1900-1980), later wife of sixth Earl of Longford, and Elizabeth Winifred "Jane" Martin (1902-1976), who
later married the art historian Kenneth Clark. These women were the first
generation of post-World War I female Oxfordites, disparagingly known as ''undergraduettes.''
Abelson failed the Oxford Home Students and was
dismissed in 1924. After returning to her now impoverished family in Paris, she
worked variously as a film extra, journalist, and traveled to New York where she
was employed as a researcher for Professor Carlton Hayes of Columbia University.
In 1927 she married Rice. The couple spent
the next three years in Paris, where David Talbot Rice was studying under the
great Byzantinist Gabriel Millet. She
traveled with him to Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Persia, and Turkey
on his excavations. Some of the digs she supervised personally. She contributed to the exhibition catalog on Russian art held at Belgrave Square, London, 1935 in conjunction with her husband and Tancred Borenius. The co-written book The Icons of Cyprus was published in 1937. During World War
II, Talbot-Rice worked in the Ministry of Information in London in the Turkish
division. After the war, she resumed publishing, with The Scythians
in 1957, The Seljuks in Asia Minor in1961, and Everyday Life in
Byzantium in 1967. Her final book, in 1970, was
biography, Elizabeth Petrovna, empress of Russia, the first full biography of
the ruler in English (and notable for its unusually positive view). After her
husband's death in 1972 she began memoirs (published in fragmentary form in 1996
by her daughter). She died at the Talbot-Rice home in Gloucester. LS